Dabbawala: The Incredible Food Delivery Service Of Mumbai
A Dabbawala is a person that collects home cooked food direct from a wife’s kitchen, takes it to their husband at work and then returns the container to wifey at the end of the day. I had no idea such a system was in place and according to the blurb that accompanies the video below it’s hugely successful. I guess you could argue that it’s a little bit sexist to get your wife to cook for you even whilst you’re out at work, but it’s still a pretty amazing system.
Dabbawala literally means “one who carries a box”; the first dabbawala was Mahadeo Havaji Bachche who started this incredible business in 1890 with 100 men. Nowadays with technology creeping across the globe your delivery instructions can be delivered by SMS, but other than that it’s massively low-tech yet hugely dependable.
The service itself is rarely interrupted, even during monsoon season these brave dabbawala’s will keep you well fed. So here’s the preamble and the video…
“Each day in Mumbai 4000 men in white outfits and matching hats transport 175,000 lunches across the big city. They retrieve the tiffens (lunch containers) of food from mothers and wives, and bring them (by foot, train, bicycle and even carried on top of their heads) to the office buildings of waiting husbands and sons. The Dabba Wallas have been doing this since the late 1800s. Despite the unsophisticated mode of transport, the lunches always arrive on time (the error rate is 1 in every 16 million transactions). It’s a pretty impressive feat and we were lucky enough to follow a couple Dabba Wallas for a day in Mumbai, and see their work first hand.”
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